Nicholas Carr's blog

Does the truth pay its invoices on time?

So there’s this new company named crayon (not Crayon, mind you, but crayon), and its claim to fame is that its offices are located on Crayonville Island in the imaginary world of Second Life. Ok, fine. You’ve got to have a shtick, and you can’t get much more shticky than that. But I’m asking myself: What does a company called crayon with an imaginary headquarters actually do? What business would such an enterprise be engaged in? Fortunately, one of the company’s founding employees has taken the time to describe “what crayon actually is” in a post on his blog. Here’s what he says:

We’re not an agency nor a consulting practice as is traditionally defined. What we are is whatever you want or need us to be.

I like to think of us as a true mash-up that combines the best in traditional and new thinking about marketing, advertising and PR.

We’re a solution provider. We’re an extension of your team. Consider us a new breed of partner – one that keeps everyone honest and on the right path. Our client is not the consumer: our client is the truth.

Now, come on. What we are is whatever you want or need us to be? Our client is the truth? This is a joke, right? I mean, it has to be a joke. If it’s not a joke, then we’ve definitely gone through the looking glass and are headed down the rabbit hole.

Our client is the truth? Hell, that doesn’t even pass the Turing Test.

You don’t have to search long to find an increasing scepticism from the virtual worlds crowd and online gamers about the ongoing hype of SL. It’s interesting and a great idea, but more people are admitting they like the idea of SL more than the actual service or the organization running it. Main concern is their scalability and uptime and some of the content.

Definition of a Consultant – “Find someone more stupid than you are and charge for the difference” … speaking as a consultant.

Maybe Neal Stephenson was onto something when he wrote “Snow Crash” (a cyber-punk SF novel about a place called the Metaverse …). We havent quite got to the direct brain implant stage, although there are evil mega vendors that inhabit this parallel world of ours called reality.

SL is an interesting playground to see what kind of real world business models can survive in a virtual world. The fact that you may use real money in their creates a very different type of game play. In fact, you’re not playing a game, but really living a lifestyle to some degree.

With a company like Crayon providing in-game consulting-like services, I wonder how billing would work and if there are collection services set up in SL. Companies, such as Electric Sheep, that provide real world consulting work for development in the virtual world use a traditional, but proven business model.